Recommended Resources
The Great Depression
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Salerno, Roger A. Louis Wirth: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
May, Lary. The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.
Rauchway, Eric. The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Watkins, T. H. The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1999.
Becker, Susan D. The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.
Schaap, Jeremy. Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.
Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Ross, Steven J. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Recommended Resources from Other Sub-Eras
Lash, Joseph P. Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Moreno, Barry. Encyclopedia of Ellis Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004.
Badger, Anthony J. FDR: The First Hundred Days. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.
Leuchtenburg, William Edward. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Diner, Hasia R. In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Pitkin, Thomas M. Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island. New York: New York University Press, 1975.
Brinkley, Alan. Liberalism and Its Discontents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Thomas, Richard W. Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Holt, Rackham. Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.
Rosenberg, Norman L. Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
McMahon, Kevin J. Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Chafe, William H., Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad, et al., eds. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South. New York: New Press, 2001.
Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Leuchtenburg, William Edward. The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
LeCompte, Tom. The Last Sure Thing: The Life and Times of Bobby Riggs. Easthampton, MA: Black Squirrel Publishing, 2003.
Miller, Richard E. The Messman Chronicles: African Americans in the US Navy, 1932–1943. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004.
Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–40. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.